Against the Odds: Helping Women Step into Their Shine

0:00 The topics and opinions express in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability, explicit or implied shall be extended to W FOURCY Radio or its employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY Radio. What's working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential. Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want working on Purpose. Now here's your host, doctor Elise Cortes. Welcome back to the Working and Purpose Program. Thanks thanks for turning in this sweek. Great to have you. This program has been on air since February of twenty nineteen, and today is its official ninth year.

1:12 I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes. If we've not met yet before and you don't know me, I'm an organizational psychologist and local therapist, speaker and author. My team and I at Gusto Now help companies to enliven and fortify their operations by articulating their purpose and building inspirational leaders and cultures activated by meeting and purpose to turn those companies from a flatline EKG to a vibrant destination workplace. There people are intrinsically motivated to perform with their best, can grow into their fuller potential, and are committed to stay and dynamically deliver on the company's mission. You can learn more about us and how we can work together at gustodashnow dot com and at Lascortes dot com. Now getting into today's program we have with us today Tamra Ryan. She's the CEO of The Women's Being Project, a social enterprise that provides transitional employment while operating a food manufacturing business to women attempting to break the cycle of chronic unemployment and poverty. She's the author of the Third Law, a book which highlights the societal obstacles and internal demons that must be overcome from marginalized women to change their lives, which is the subject of our conversation today. We'll be sharing a bit a lot about what she's learned at serving as the CEO in this capacity, and then in the last segment, we're going to talk about some of her ideas where she invites us all to contribute to how we can overcome and address some of these major systemic issues she knows today from Denver, Colorado, Tamra, Welcome to Working on Purpose. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me.

2:38 You're very welcome. I so enjoyed reading this marvelous book that you put together. The stories I mean that you've chalked full in this short amount of pages, and an incredible compilation of issues that face the United States, certainly in other parts of the world as well, and the stories really bring them home. As I said to you, you really opened my eyes camera to a world and problems that I just didn't understand existed to the extent that they did. So I really want to thank you for that. Well. I appreciate that and really that gets at exactly why I wrote the book. I joke that when I became the CEO of Women's Being Project, I became so much more interesting at cocktail parties, and it was really not because of me, but because I had so many interesting stories and I was learning so much, and I finally realized that all the biases and prejudices I came into the organization really frankly not knowing I had, but that were confronted every day that I needed to talk about that because I knew I wasn't the only one who felt that, for instance, somebody who was a felon had made bad choices and they deserved what they had gotten. I just think that there were so many times when I was being confronted with fact over opinion that I really I felt compelled to talk about it. Well, you did it beautifully. Now, listeners and viewers, what I want to situate with you. Many of you tune into this program and have over the years because you're very interested in either

4:09 trying to gain your footing into more meaningful work or find your purpose. So as we talked over all these issues that She's going to help us understand, I want you to listen and pay attention to because you just might find there's something in here for you that you want to work on and devote your energies, your talented maybe even your life to addressing. So listen up. This could be interesting. So let's first talk about the Women's Being Project itself. I know that it was founded in nineteen eighty nine, so will you tell us how did it come to be? And for listeners of viewers who have not read your book yet, what is it? Women's Being Project believes that all women have the power to transform their lives through employment, So I want to start with that. And we were founded in nineteen eighty nine by a woman named Jossy Air. Jossy had gone back to school in her late fifties to get her master's degree in social work, and as a part of getting her degree, she had to commit to being in a nonprofit organation for the whole school year. She chose to work at a daytime homeless shelter for women and kids. She committed to being there several days a week, and what she saw was that women would come in and use the services of the shelter, and the shelter would keep them safe and then they'd leave eventually because they'd get a job, and I didn't need the daytime shelter anymore. But she was there long enough to see that the women kept coming back and they were clearly caught in a cycle that they weren't able to get out of. They might have had the ability to get a job, but they didn't have the skills to keep it. So she thought, if I could teach the women to work by actually working, that would be the cure for poverty. And so she invested five hundred dollars of her own money and bought beans and put

5:41 two women to work making ten bean soup. That was our original product and is why we were called Women's Being Project. They made sixty one hundred dollars from that five hundred dollars investment, which you know, from an ROI standpoint, wouldn't that be awesome to get out of avery investment? And that was really the beginning of realizing that a business could help support a mission. And I was nineteen eighty nine, so it was really in the early days where before social enterprise kind of had a name. One of the things I'm proud of is that throughout our thirty four almost thirty five year history, we've stayed very true to that original idea. How we deliver our services and which services we deliver, of course have evolved in thirty five years, but really fundamental to our ethos is that we're going to create an environment as safe and accepting work environment where women can learn the skills they need to get and keep employment, and when we can set her on a path to employment, what we're doing is changing the trajectory of not just her life, but also her family's life. We're going to dig into what that looks like as well as we go along here. But I want to kind of continue to peel back in sort of the same way that I got to know you and the Women's Being Project, which was through your vanish point, your experiential set, which I really appreciated, just how authentic you were in your shares that you were like, gosh, you know, I came into it thinking this. So I think it would be useful, as you said, for you to describe your actual mindset about these women and what they were dealing with before you came to

7:14 the Bean Project. How would you describe that? Where did it come from? Well, what I would say start with the fact that I was born a white, middle class girl in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and so I so much of you, we as humans, surround ourselves by other people who are like us, and so so much of my attitude and opinions were shaped by that I talk about in the book the Little Poem or whatever that I remember hearing as a teenager. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage. And you know, that's a cute little thing that little girls say. But what that does is it represents opinions and attitudes from and about the people you surround yourselves with. And so I do remember thinking, you know, how shameful that it was to be a teen mom, or how you know people who were addicts really didn't have self control, or how people who were felons, you know, deserved what they got had gotten in terms of their punishment. And what I didn't recognize is that what I thought was that we all had the same choices. And so I remember when I one of the first weeks I was in my role as CEO, I was working on the production line to sort of get to know our operations and get to know the women, and I said to one of the women, you know, how do you get here? And she said, well, when I was ten or twelve, I started selling drugs and that gave me the ability to support my Maybe she was sixteen and she was supporting

8:48 her son and her brother or something like that. And I said, well, didn't you, you know, think about sort of what was going to happen in the long term, because she eventually went to prison. And I asked it. In hindsight, I'm mortified that I asked the question this way. But I asked it as though, you know, she had this whole menu of choices, and she chose selling drugs over going to like high school prom or you know, college prep courses, and the reality is that that's not the choice. What I've learned is that often the women are chased faced with five bad choices, and they choose the one that they think is maybe the best of the bad. But what makes it a good choice might be that she's able to make enough money selling drugs to support her kids. And so I think what happened was over and over again. I was just confronted with this idea that what I thought was good and bad was actually totally contextual.

9:48 Yeah, I just really, you really brought it home. It's so powerfully Tamraa in your book, and I really, like I said, you really opened a lot of understanding and comprehension and empathy and compassion and me for sure, and I hope our listeners too and our viewers. So I want to go just a little bit deeper, because you entitle your book the Third Law, and you really have come to understand women in poverty and women marginalized in a way that probably very few uts will ever understand the way that you do. Can you say a bit more about just how disenfranchised they are from the community in every sense essentially. Yeah, Well, first I'll say I called it the Third Law because it refers to Newton's Third law motion for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction, and I wanted to talk about that. I thought of that as the title because I really see that women work so hard to change their lives, and yet there are so many things that push back on that change. So one example is that the way the criminal justice system works, so women get out of they do their time in prison, they get out, maybe they're in a halfway house or on parole.

10:52 Well, some of the requirements for they have to keep a job as a requirement of their parole, and then they also have requirements, say to do drug testing. So if you're on a random drug test schedule, you have to call in every single day or now it's probably moved to online, but you have to go log in every day to find out whether or not that's your day. And so you can't warn your employer ahead of time that you have to go in and you have until five pm then to go and get your drug tests. Well, that means that every random intervals you're forced to talk to your employer about the fact that you're still on parole and you're still being monitored. And so, you know, when you think about that, is it sounds like a pretty simple thing, but it also means that every day you're confronted with these mistakes that you made. I think that what's interesting about our criminal justice system is that the whole system is geared toward depersonalizing or dehumanizing people. You get a number when you're convicted, and then in fact, when you finish your sentence, the term is that you killed your number and so and so, For instance, if you have an appointment with your parle officer. Let's say it's at eight thirty in the morning, and you let your employer know that you have to the appointment. They can make you wait two or three hours to see them, and so then you know, you think about the whole day, or you know, the better part of a day is shot in terms of work and earning an income, and

12:24 those are all things that you, as a pear league, don't have any control over. You don't get to say, well, I would like to have my appointment on Wednesday at two thirty, because that's you know, I'm off work. You're told when those things are happening. And you know, that's just one example. There are so many other examples, whether it is the benefits that are helping people bridge the gap while they're working, they're moving into the work world. If you make a dollar too much, benefits get cut off. There aren't most of the benefits do not have ramps, they have cliffs, and so you think about you know, she takes several steps forward and she's starting to earn an income, and then the next thing you know, she's just earned a little bit too much and she's no longer eligible for that thing that maybe was allowing her to not only work but feed her kids. So I you know, it's a little bit as you can tell, and from the book, it's a bit of a soapbox thing for me, because I think that it's there are so many things we as a society, and when as voters, when we're voting on policy or we're sending people to Washington and they're determining policy, very few people are understanding how what that policy looks like boots on the ground as it's being implemented, which I definitely want to talk about further when we talk about just some of your ideas for reform and to be able to address these things. But I just was blown away camera by just the sheer number of boxed in situations these women find themselves,

13:54 and you know, in terms of what the rules are in the halfway house, what they have, it's one single enter and it served at this one time. They can't talk to fellow felons, who do they talk to, They can't talk to a whole array, and so just learning the rules and all these constraints seemed completely overwhelming to me. Well, I think it's both that and even keeping track of you know of what the rules are, and that also understanding when the rule stops and you have some self efficacy, which I also talk about in my book. I remember when when President Obama was for the first time he ran for office, and we our old location for Women's Being Project used to be across the street from a lovely park, and Michelle Obama gave a speech in that park, and all our women went to hear her talk and got super excited about voting for president for Obama and getting him elected. And so a bunch of them went and registered to vote.

14:56 Well, it turns out that if you're a fallen it's a felony to register to vote, and so several of them came into work the next day and then and a couple of them on their own realized their mistake and then just had to figure out how to dial that back. But they weren't allowed to vote. And also, I think it's really interesting that it is a felony to register to vote, and that is something that I think that is starting to shift in our country, where we're allowing even prisoners to vote. But it really speaks to, in my view of the biases and prejudices as a society we have around people formerly incarcerated people. Indeed, Wow, So I want to dig more into who comes to the Women's Being Project and really what they're up against in terms of what you're trying to teach them. But before we get into that, let's grab our first break. I'm your host, Doctor Release Cortez. We're on the air with Tamra Ryans. She's the CEO of Women's Being Project, a social enterprise that provides transitional employment while operating a food manufacturing business to women attempting to break the cycle of chronic unemployment and poverty. We've been talking a bit about why timer wrote this book, what she's trying to address. After the break, we're going to talk about the kind of women that they actually help, and she's going to start talking a little bit about how the criminal justice system works against rehabilitation. Stay with us, will be right back. Doctor Elise Cortez is a management consultant specializing in

16:37 meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for a greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a Lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at Eliscortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to a lease Alise at Elisecortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor release Cortes, as I am dedicated to helping to create a world where people realize their potential at work and are led by inspirational leaders will help them find and contribute their greatness and we do business a better's the world. I continue to write my own books and so my latest came out in March of twenty twenty three. It's called The Great Revitalization. How activating meeting and purpose can radically enliven your business. And I wrote it to help leaders understand the lay of today's workforce land and then giving them twenty two best purchases to be able to equip them to build the culture to actually address what they want.

18:00 You can learn more about it at at leastcore test dot com or find the book on Amazon if you are just joining us now. My guest is tam or Ryan. She's the author of The Third Law, a book which highlights the societal obstacles and internal demons that must be overcome for marginalized women to change their lives. Okay, so now let's do that. Let's talk. Let's really help our listeners and viewers understand who does who the Women's Being Project serve. So first if you could talk about, you know, the core of the social enterprise mission of the Being Project, what it is, it's that it's actually out to do. And then I want you to talk about the typical woman that applies for work at the project. Sure, well, as a social enterprise, we are hiring women to come to work for us for six to nine months into a transitional job, and we see employment as one of the most important stepping stones to self sufficiency. So our entire focus is on helping her overcome her barriers to employment. And what we know is that barriers. What I know today is barriers really don't happen singularly. They're complex and their innerwoven and there and they're often really challenging to overcome, and they look like things like not having housing or being formerly incarcerated. And so the women come to work for us for the sixty to nine month period, and during the time they're with us, they split their full time paid job.

19:25 Seventy percent is working in our food manufacturing business. They might also help us ship. We ship all across the US. We have a retail store at our location. They might work there. They're basically helping us operate the business. Thirty percent of their paid time is spent working on themselves, so we call it the bean job and the U job the you job. During that thirty percent, they are working on very important skills like better communication and conflict resolution and healthy really relationships and working. They do a trauma skills workshop where they're working on their PTSD symptoms, so it's a very internalized thing. Then they're also learning things like basic computer skills financial literacy. So it's both things that translate to a work environment, but also things that help her show up differently in a work environment and I think also make her a better mom and a better community member. I mean, ultimately, when we're helping a woman change her life. We have to remember that that ripple extends way beyond her.

20:36 I really believe when you change a woman's life, you change your family's life. And that's what we get to witness. A typical woman who comes to us hasn't had a job longer than a year in her lifetime. The average age is in the mid thirties. She has an average of three children. What we used to see is she rarely would have custody of those kids. We're seeing definitely now a transition that she often does have custody of her kids. And so we're finding that we need to help her find resources for childcare and also you know, things as simple as diapers, support and things like that. She is most likely was a teen mom. She often is a recovering addict. Ninety five percent or so of the women we serve are former formerly incarcerated, almost always related to addiction, and so I think that's what's important and one of the things I recognized when I saw that rarely does a woman go to a prison for a violent offense. It's almost always something she was doing to support her habit, or perhaps she was arrested and she was convicted of possession with intent to distribute, even if that's not what she intended. So when you think about barriers to employment, you know, I've hit on all the big ones, you know for sure. Also lots of history of domestic violence or some sort of abuse in her younger years. And when you look at female prison population that's also overlaps, you really see that

22:10 a lot. And then one of the things I talk about in my book is, in addition to histories of addiction, also histories of mental illness, which in many women are interrelated. They don't necessarily stand in isolation. They really In fact, that chapter is called chicken and egg because you know who, we don't really know which comes first for for people. Oh there's so much there camera, So yeah, I just what I want to make sure that our listeners and viewers understand because they haven't yet read the book like I have, is just really the full extent of what these women are up against, and they that they just really don't they don't really have any entry level skills that that are that are assailable, and that really most no one else will really give them a job. And so your program is is is really it's a lifesaver, and it's a lifeline, and I remember the status what was like four un and fifty women might apply, but you have space for forty or fifty of them or something like that. Yeah, And even so, the book has been out for a while, and during the pandemic we really saw the applicant pool dip. We're back to seeing we hire four times a year now and we are going to hire in February. Our next higher date will hire. We have space for about eight women, and we have over two hundred applicants for those eight spots. So it really what my sense emergency is that the demand is much greater than the supply in this case, and so I go to work every day thinking about, Okay, how do

23:42 we increase our capacity and for us, sales create jobs. We're an unusual nonprofit organization in that regard because sales are our leading indicator. That's what creates employment. Because if we don't have enough work, it's not really a meaningful experience. While she's on the production line, she's going to be learning the basics of job readiness, the fact that you have to come to work every day and on time, and take direction and pay attention to detail. Those are things that won't matter where she goes in the future. And in fact, we're not trying to train the future being supmakers of America, which obviously would be somewhat limited. We are really trying to help women learn the basic skills that every employer says that they need. Beautiful, Okay, so you've already alluded this, but I do want to just take it a little bit deeper here because it's such a I think it's such an important thing that you're exposing here, and that is how the criminal justice system works against rehabilitation.

24:38 First, that these women are actually in prison for an addiction or a mental health issue disorder invariably, and then they're up against the criminal justice system. Yes, well, again, I think the system is not really about rehabilitation. I mean, I think we'd like to belie believe that it is, but I don't see a lot of evidence of that. And I do think that there is some criminal justice reform that is happening. I think that often it's happening in terms of how people end up in prison, not what happens once they're in So there are a number of things. For instance, historically, when you're in prison, you're really viewed as cheap labor, and so you you might have an opportunity work, but in many instances you're just earning a few pennies an hour, and so that would be you know, and the labor really is not necessarily something that's preparing people for what they're going to do next. We have rules in many of our states where, for instance, you could get trained in some instances to get a cosmetology license, but many states have the rule that when you get out, you can't actually you're not allowed to have the license because you have a felony. And so, you know, it begs a question, why would we train people for something they can't have right and and so you know, and we make the make

26:10 the bar for again when somebody is released. We make the rules so rigid that it really makes it challenging to keep a job because you're faced every day with the fact that you have you're still dealing with your your sentence in some way. And I think that what ends up happening is that it is more about proving to someone that they're bad and they deserve punishment than about saying here's here is a different path for your future. There Again, there have been some changes in the state of Colorado, for instance. Now the state just passed a bill where prisoners who are who get an education get a certain amount of time on off of their sentence, and the higher the level of education, the more time they get off of their sentence. And so I do think that we're starting to see some shifts. What we have to realize, though, is that over the last forty years, there has been an over eight hundred percent increase in women being sent to prison, and so we'refore quite some time going to be as a society dealing with We might be decreasing the inflow into prison, but we're dealing with formally incarcerated people who in our communities have a twenty seven percent unemployment rate, which is higher than any time in our history as a country, including during the depression, which I think is pretty significant for us to think about as a culture. If we're going to

27:44 expect someone who's been basically in a system that's dehumanized them to suddenly be released into the community and become human, and yet kind them off at the knees, not higher them, not not give them the resources that they need in order to re enter the community. I mean, what if we really expect is going to happen. I mean, I think it's those kinds of things that really drive recidivism. Not so much that people can't change. I think we make it so hard for them to create new lives for themselves. One of the things that you said that really struck me was you don't know how they can stay motivated sometimes with all their up against I mean I could see that too. How do you keep moving one day after the other, up against all of these barriers and obstacles. I think what ends up happening, And it doesn't surprise me, given you sort of human nature, But I think what ends up happening is you just sort of give it up and give it up to God typically, and you sort of say, well, if it's God's will, then it'll happen. Because when I hear women say that, it's usually not a spiritual belief. It's really a lack of self efficacy.

28:55 And so I think that that's a defense mechanism to keep from feeling so demoralized. We had a woman in our program, and I talked about her in the book. She started selling drugs when she was pretty young, early teens, and that was because both of her parents were using and so then and that was how she thought she could spend more time with them. And then by the time she was sixteen or seventeen, she'd had her first child. And she is very smart, and so she became a pretty big time drug dealer, and she actually had four children. She was a big enough drug dealer that she actually was convicted on federal charges. She went away to federal prison. When I met her, she had gotten out of prison, and she had cussy. Of all four of her kids by then, they were aging and ranging in age from eight to eighteen, and she was had At the time, I think our wage was about eight dollars an hour, and she was making our wage at Women's Being Project, and she was getting one hundred and fifty dollars a month in food stamps. And believe it or not, she was making that work, which I would love, you know, any of us would benefit from that kind of creativity. She went in for her redetermination for her food stamps, she and they caught her because she made too much to twenty five dollars a month. And she said to me, I don't know why I'm trying, because I didn't have to worry about this when I was selling drugs, I could always provide for my kids,

30:27 and we helped her bridge the gap for a period of time and got her access to food, and she was pretty close to finishing our program. When she finished, she actually got a job with ironically, a food distributor, making over eighteen dollars an hour. And what I will say is I love that story because of the irony of it and the fact that you know she was able to say but too often that's not how the story ends. But the story ends with somebody feeling very demoralized and disempowered. And we can we can do a lot as an organization in terms of helping helping her feel more empowered and helping her witness success. But when society and the systems are working against her, that's really a really big challenge that's hard for one organization to overcome. I think it's really important to talk about it. And of course, as I'm I said of my introduction, I'm an organizational psychologist, so self equacy efficacy is a word and a phrase that I understand very well.

31:27 But I think it's really important that we bring this point home because you know that you talk about how this lack of self efficacy is common among these women, and they because they do feel helpless. They have all of these things, somebody else is controlling their their schedules, their comings and goings, how much they can make, what kind of benefits they can get. You know, they're trying to figure out how to stay out of prison, finish their sentence. There's all these external factors that set them up to believe that they have no control over anything that happens to them. And I think that's really important to situate because well, no wonder you know, they're they're making the choices that they're making. Yeah, And I want to make sure that your viewers and listeners don't think what I'm saying is, oh, you know, poor these poor women, they're all victims, because that's not what I'm saying.

32:14 I'm a very firm believer in personal responsibility. And in fact, when we hire women, you know, one might be wondering, when we have two hundred applicants and we can hire eight women, how do we decide? And one of the key things that we're looking for is someone being ready to make change, and we're so we're listening for change language versus someone coming to us to an interview and saying and talking about how all the things that have happened to her happened because other people did them right. And so you know, I do want to say that we are firm believers in that. And yet what I watch is that even while the women are trying so hard to take control of their lives and to you at a job, keep with their job, support their kids, or get custody back of their kids, I just feel like they just get cut off at the knees so many times that and that might be that once they I've watched women apply to get an apartment and have the landlord turn her down because she had a criminal charge on her record. It wasn't her conviction, but the charge was intent to kill, and she was convicted of a misdemeanor, a misdemeanor charge but or eventually convicted of a misdemeanor, but the charge was intent to kill, and so landlords wouldn't rent to her. So how do you tell someone no, you have control over what happens when somebody else really actually has control over whether or not

33:47 she could get an apartment, for instance, Yeah, thank you for that clarification. Camera and I'll just say this before a grab on the next break, So listeners of yours as we take our next break, think about this, because I think what Tim situating here about what these women are up against will help us situate what she's going to share with us about some of the ways that she's putting forth that maybe we could address and start to improve these societal and systemic issues and institutions. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortez. We've been on the air with Tama Ryan. She's the CEO of Women's Being Project, a social enterprise that provides transitional employment while operating a food manufacturing business to women attempting to break the cycle of chronic unemployment and poverty. After the break, we're going to talk about her perspective and what she's learned about how mental illness works with drug use and poverty, how they all intersect. Stay with us, will be right back. Doctor release Court has as a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on

35:20 purpose. This is Working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise alisee at elisecortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor release Cortes. I mentioned in the last break about my latest book, The Great Vitalization. What I did for you to help you along with your journey is I also created an organizational assessment for you to learn to the extent to which your company is leadership and culture are meeting the standards of today's workforce. It's a three page assessment. You can get it. You can download it at gustodashnow dot com and see how you're actually doing if you are just joining us today. My guest is Tamra Ryan. She's the author of The Third Law, a book which highlights the societal obstacles and internal demons that must be overcome for marginalized women to change their lives. So as we queued up just before the break, I think the way that you have a whole chapter, as you call it, Chicken and Eggs, and it's really about mental illness, drug use and how poverty intersect. And there's lots in there that really helped you know sort of mental illness epidemic and what that is.

36:37 But if you could just speak to a bit of what you've seen about the chicken and phenomenon of those items. I found that there were so many women I was meeting who had had been diagnosed with mental illness, and often they were very eager to tell us because it was after a long period of time, you know that they had been diagnosed, so it was such a relief and so and what I also saw was that there was there seemed to be a lot of overlap between women with diagnosed mental illness and drug use. And so I did quite a bit of research, and I realized that we don't actually medically know which comes first. Does someone who with mental illness perhaps decide to use because they're self medicating, or does use of drugs cause mental illness?

37:28 And I suspect you know, the human body being what it is, it's you know, it's probably a little bit of both for people. But then when you look at also sort of laying over that, the fact that people who grow up in poverty are much more likely to have mental illness also, And that really is when you think about all the all the stressors of living in poverty and being resource constrained, we want to think of it that way, how much that stress really causes people to be challenged in their decision making. It leads to mental illness in situations where if you don't have the resources, you can't know how often have we thrown money out a problem because we have the ability to do that. When you're in a resource constrained environment, you don't have that ability. And so what it makes the topic really to me really interesting is you can't just take one thing and say well, if we can fix this one thing, then we can fix the other things.

38:29 They really are it is pretty complicated. And if you can't really say, well, because she used drugs, now she has this mental illness, or because she's mentally ill she's using the drugs, you really have to have to theoretically treat both. Yeah, yeah, thank you. It's just really incredibly eye opening. It's just the how complex the problem is or set our problems are. Okay, so just briefly, because I do want to get into some of your suggestions on what we could address. I thought your whole chapter on My Motherhood is Virtually Impossible to Avoid was incredibly compelling and fascinating, so many new insights. Can you share a bit of those insights? Yeah, you know, this one really hits home for me as a mom because I remember, you know, how many conversations before I became a mom where you know, I talked with friends and we'd talk about how you know, whether or not, you know, we were often as a couple we were ready to have kids, right, do we have the right resources, do we have the right house for things like that? And what I've witnessed with the women we serve is that it's almost the reverse. Instead of what can we give the kids, it is more what can the kid give me?

39:43 And I found a very interesting book that was based on a multi year study done in the Philadelphia area called Promises we Can Keep, and that really helped me better understand when you are a woman growing up an environment where what you see around you is there's there doesn't seem to be any real good reason to stay in school because you don't see that anybody is better off because they do. And you really don't have a lot of self worth, and you're not really valued by your community. But you witness that when when someone has a baby, that elevates their status in the community. And when a man says to you, I want to have a baby with you, that makes you feel worthy, And so when you think about culturally, I think for me, it helped me reframe how I think about women in poor communities who have kids, and also why often teen teenagers have have kids when you know, from my perspective, she's not ready and she's not you know, she doesn't have what she needs in place to take care of this child. That's not really how it's viewed. And and to me that was really enlightening. Yes, And so was interesting that I learned from that book was that if what it takes to be a good mom, how I would define it versus how a woman in a poor neighborhood might define it is very different. So a

41:15 woman in a poor neighborhood might say, well, my kid has diapers and she has clothes on, and I'm pushing her around in the stroller, and I'm a good mom and and you know, in my with my paradigm, you know that, and which was strongly influenced by my upbringing, it is so much more than that. And so I again, it was a really great example of having grown up and being surrounded by people who shared my viewpoint and then really see that that wasn't the case. I overheard two women speaking once and they were talking about how another, a third person was pregnant, and one said, well, you know, she really shouldn't be pregnant, she has, you know, several other kids, And the other one says, well, can't she just give it away? And it was like a It was such a crass sort of exchange. But to me, what it probably really speaks to is the fact that it really, again isn't about what you were giving the child or have the ability to give the child. It's about what the child can give to you. Yeah. I also was impressed by the point that you made that for some you know, for some of these women, and given what they're up against, becoming a parent might be one of the biggest things they actually achieve. In life. Well, yes, and they've achieved it by virtue having a child, and they could be

42:45 a great parent or a good mom by virtue of being able to keep the baby in diapers and and so I think that and it is an opportunity for unconditional love, right And I think that's a really important thing to remember, is that this this child will will have to love me. I'm its mother. Mm hmmmm. Very very helpful and insightful to understand that perspective because, as you say, I did, that's not the one that I grew up with. So for the last of the show here, Tim or what I want to do is I want to I want to go through as many of the ten things that you put forth that we can maybe change or support marginalized people in are in the community, because I think it's fantastic because you put you've convinced us that there are some real major issues here and I don't know if there are any you know there. I have the ten in front of me, but if there are, if there's ones that you really want to speak to first, or if you want me to list them off, I want to get as many as we can. Well, I think I want to say first that I think when we look at some of these issues, they do really feel big and overwhelming, and they and feel like maybe we can't do anything about it. And I actually want to challenge that notion that I think in order to affect change is going to take all of us doing our little bit to lift up everyone. And so that's my list of ten things. Is most of them are actually pretty little things like become a big brother or a big sister with big brothers and big sisters. And the reason I use that as an example is because the research shows that if a child

44:17 has just one adult and it doesn't have to be a family member, that could be the thing that ultimately sets them on a very different path. So that's a big one. I think helping people. What I would like to do if I could say one thing that in my lifetime, if I could, if I could accomplish, it would be to change hearts and minds to convince people to hire based on talent and potential rather than background. Yes, and so there are probably many people watching or listening today who have the ability to hire people. And I would say, give a formally incarcerated person a chance. The research shows that they are much more loyal and they are great employees. That would be one thing that I think it would be relatively easy to do. One of the things that might be a little controversial on my list is that I said, let addicts fail or succeed on their own.

45:12 And I say that because very often loved ones of people who are in the midst of their addiction inadvertently do very do a lot of things that really actually enable the addiction. And as heartbreaking as it is, we need to let them go and do it for themselves, because the only person that's in that addiction is that person. And so again, when I wrote that chapter in the book, I was I knew it was kind of a harsh perspective, but I do really believe that you've got to do that. What else is there? There's foster, adopt a child from the US. We have a tendency in our country to adopt lots and lots of kids from other countries countries.

45:58 Yeah, and that's there's nothing wrong with that, But there also aren't enough families in our country who are willing to adopt. And that comes from the perspective I know, you know that I by the last chapter of the book is about the journey our family has been on and adopting our son who came to our family when he was two and today is sixteen years old and six foot three. But that has definitely been a journey and probably one of the most challenging things I've done in my life. Yes, and I really applaud that, and it's very inspiring to me. And you have your own daughter as well, so the two of them together are your family. Now. A few of the things that you said that you offer here that I think are interesting and worth mentioning is, you know, support a safe house.

46:45 You know, you also mentioned support a women's foundation in your area. Those are two things that are extremely actionable right now. Yeah, absolutely, and they really come from the standpoint of, you know, there are you know, we view our work at Women's Being Project on a continuum and we don't want it to be all things to all people, and yet there are A safe house is a place where a woman can go where, you know, for a short period of time, it can get her out of an abusive situation, where she can get on her feet and then she can start planning for her what her life is going to be like and there are way to view beds across the country. In any city you look at, there are too few beds in safe houses, so that would be a way to help expand the resources. And then a women's foundation. The great thing about that is they support women at sort of all levels. Colorado the Women's Foundation of Colorado helps young women be more likely to go to college and is particularly first generation college students. And so within women's foundations you can often find causes that really resonate with you, that relate to women. Beautiful, Tamra, We're at the end of the program here, and you know by now that this program is listening to by people around the world who are out trying to either join or create workplaces where people can thrive. We develop those and solutionarers that lead them to their greatness and we do business better in the world.

48:09 What would you like to leave them with that we don't have to accept the things we don't like. One of the things I respect most about jesse Er, our founder, is that she looked around and saw things she didn't like. And we all do that, but not very many of us do something about it. And we all can do something about it, even if it's really little. It's going to take all of us to change the world. Beautiful way to finish, tam Or, thank you very much. We are about working on purpose here and mattering, so I think that's a great invitation and challenge. Thank you very much for your work, your heart, your soul and being on working on purpose. Thank you so much. Very welcome listeners, viewers. If you'll learn more about Tama Ryan, her book or the work she and her team are doing at the Women's Being Project, start at the Women's Being So it's Women's Bean Projects, So Women's beea nproject dot com. Last week, if you missed the live show, you can always catch it be a recorded podcast, we are on the air with Debs Malenski talking about her book Brain On. We learned we have an opportunity to nurture our relationship with our very own brains and some strategies to best utilize our focus and handle our emotions during the day to tackle our most prized projects and get the results we most want. Next week, we'll be on the air with Brad Doutster, the author of Belonging Rules, Five crucial actions that build unity and foster performance. See you there and remember work is one of the best adventures and means of realizing our potential and making the impact we crave. So let's work on Purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure

49:45 to tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Release Cortes, each week on W four CY. Together we'll create a world where business operates conscientiously. Leadership inspires and passion performance, and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose they crave. See you there, Let's work on Purpose. M m hm